You all know the songs that get played endlessly on the radio these days: Paralyzed, Hey There Delilah, songs like those. You can’t listen to a mainstream music station for more than half an hour without hearing one of those two, I can pretty much guarantee it.

It’s the same when it comes to politics. Certain ideas and concepts get repeated over and over, until they become the conventional wisdom. Some of these things can be disproved simply by looking a little, but no matter how untruthful it is, the facts will always be mismangled into an unruly juxtaposition of figures that morphs reality to fit into the “conventional wisdom”.

One of these such fairy tales is thus: The Republicans cannot win in ‘08.

The facts say otherwise. All you have to do is glimpse at a recent Gallup Poll to see that McCain, the Republican nominee-in-waiting, holds a marginal lead over either of the two remaining Dems. While this could very possibly fade once one wins the nomination and memories of the bitter primary battle fades, the fact remains that the decision is far from set in stone. And yet, talk about it in conversation and most people will tell you that George W. ruined any chance the Republicans had at the White House.

Another is that Conservatives have only a slight chance of forming the government here in Canada at any given time. That the left wing is far more powerful, and holds a strangle hold on Canadian politics. While I would have to agree that the left (NDP) and the centre (Liberals) tend to be more powerful combined against the right (Conservatives, PC, Reform, SoCred, etc), you have only to look at history to see that the Liberals are not so dominant when facing a united right. In recent history, they haven’t bested one since Wayne Gretzky’s rookie season.

You can’t just accept the overplayed, conventional wisdom. Even the media can see through it, when they choose to do so.